I’ve been thinking a lot lately about living abroad and why I don’t. I have plenty of international experience—from living in Chile and Poland to extensive travels on four continents. Despite my wanderlust, something keeps me on home soil, and a week spent with Magic, Science and Religion by Bronisław Malinowski, Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn, and Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper taught me something about the kind of writer I want to be and helped me understand why I choose to live in the US these days.

Magic, Science, and Religion

A random reference in another book led me to finally pull this tattered paperback from my to-read shelf. I have a cultural bias toward Poles and though I had no real idea what this book was about, I was in.

I wish I had known what the book was about. I have a degree in sociology, so observing cultures should be my thing, but Malinowski’s book made me profoundly uncomfortable. I appreciated how he started out by validating more primitive uses of science (even though I hated the use of the word “primitive”). I did not like anything thereafter. Magic, science, and religion should be fascinating topics, but when a culture’s most precious myths are told with complete scientific detachment, I’m out.

They tell how a malicious being of human shape, but not of human nature, went into a piece of bamboo somewhere on the northern shore of Normanby Island. The piece of bamboo drifted northwards till it was washed ashore near the promontory of Yayvau or Vakuta. A man from the neighboring village of Kwadagila heard a voice in the bamboo and opened it. The demon came out and taught him sorcery. This, according to the informants in the south, is the real starting point of black magic. – Bronisław Malinowski

It wasn’t Malinowski’s fault that I hated this book—he wrote a very classic anthropological study. He taught me that I am not interested in detached observers in life or in writing. I like narrative. I want my readers to engage with characters and details and story.

Travels with Myself and Another

Ann Hedreen turned me on to Martha Gellhorn in a recent post about curiosity and one of my favorite travel companions bought the book for me for Christmas. I really enjoyed Gellhorn’s independent spirit. She is famous for being one of Hemingway’s wives. She should be famous for picking up and doing whatever she wanted all over the world. The book covers trips she took to China (while it was under attack from Japan), the Caribbean (while it was under attack from Nazis), Africa (during regime change), and the Soviet Union (where she visited a literary dissident). Need I add that she took these trips mostly for fun?

My favorite chapter was about her time in China. She visited many of the same places I have and I enjoyed thinking about how in such a large country we all end up in the same places. She was there before the communists were in power and it was interesting to see how much has changed and how much has not.

Though I hate to admit it, I am not a resolute traveler, and this is something Gellhorn and I have in common. But whereas I blame myself for a miserable few days spent in the wrong part of Bangkok (there’s a reason western tourists stick to Khao San Road), Gellhorn seems to expect all of the world to live up to her standards. Perhaps Gellhorn and I are too much alike for me to love her. We have perfectionistic expectations and are disappointed when they are not met. Except that I would never have the balls to take off across Africa essentially by myself.

[Hemingway] considered me thoughtfully. “The trouble with you, M., is that you think everybody is exactly like you. – Martha Gellhorn

Reading Gellhorn’s interpretations of the world made me crave the chance to form my own opinions in the way that you get to when you are seeing a new way of life for the first time. I think if Gellhorn had described some of her cultural interactions (especially in Africa) for me instead of sharing her reactions to them, I might have spent less time questioning her opinion and more time focusing on her story. I realized that this engagement is essential for me as a reader though I am sometimes guilty of trying to shape a reader’s experience rather than trusting them to make their own.

Dispatches from the Edge

The highlight of this nonfiction binge was definitely Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge. Cooper found a way to marry a straightforward reportage of some pretty horrific war and devastation with a frank look at the trauma of his own life. For the majority of the book, he keeps his own emotion out of the narrative. He paints the scenes in enough detail that the reader can easily interpret and react to the facts on their own. This book hit exactly the right tone.

On the plane, a flight attendant asks a Sri Lankan passenger if she’s comfortable.

This pulling back on reporting emotion during the most poignant and trying moments is something I learned in grad school, but it still strikes me how powerful omission can be. Cooper trusts his reader to experience regional events like the tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the genocide in Rwanda as well as personal events like his brother’s suicide. By not telling us how to feel, he allows for a much more complex array of emotions.

Even as Cooper seems to come into his own emotions during his outrage at the handling of Hurricane Katrina, he carefully balances journalistic distance with the story of his family’s relationship to the area. This is a deeply personal book and I found a deep respect for Cooper as a reporter, writer, and human being.

Why I Still Live in the US

I envy those living abroad, but I shouldn’t. Living in the US has been my choice. All the things I love about living abroad—the fresh way of seeing, the deepened cultural understanding, and the special feeling of otherness—are transitory. The heightened awareness that comes with living in a foreign country helped make me a writer, but when new countries become home, my observation curve plateaus until I pick up roots and move again. Settling in one place has helped me internalize those skills and turn them toward subtler contrasts.

In my life, and not always by my choice, the idea of moving to another continent was often tied to the idea of running away. As a result, my enduring feeling of living abroad is restless homelessness and transience—you cannot stop lest the adrenaline fade and all the feelings you are fleeing catch up with you. I don’t want to live on that expat edge anymore.

I wanted emotion but couldn’t find it here, so I settled for motion. – Anderson Cooper

Of course, escape is far from the only reason to live abroad. Opportunity and adventure have shaped migration patterns since the beginning of time. I am lucky to have had the chance to learn that home can be anywhere you make it, and I have friends who are happily making homes on other continents on a more permanent basis who I can live vicariously through. But for me right now, the greatest challenge is learning to stand in place and face myself where I am. That happens to be in the US. I may move again someday (my husband and I still cherish that artistic dream of Paris), but when I do, it will not be because I am running away. It will be because I am on steady footing with myself—because I have learned all I can from home and am ready for the next adventure.

In a rapidly globalizing world, we are all moving away from our ancestral homelands. As an American, I have too many ancestral homelands to even choose between them, which I think means I cannon truly understand what a homeland is. Bharati Mukherjee captures beautifully the feeling of displacement in her story collection, Darkness.

For at least the last century it has been possible and not uncommon to uproot oneself and seek a better fortune and life elsewhere on the globe. People from different cultures have migrated at different times and for different reasons. Sometimes they take their family or neighbors with them and parts of their ancestral culture as well. Sometimes they are forced to give it up in the name of assimilation.

Mukherjee’s characters hail from what used to be the British colony of India—from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. They are Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh. What they have in common is that they are far from home. This is never more evident than in “The World According to Hsü.”

In the story, a half-Indian, half-Czech Canadian woman (Ratna) and her Canadian husband vacation on an island off of Africa that finds itself in the midst of a civil war. In that chaos and among people of many nationalities, Ratna is for the first time at ease.

“She poured herself another glass, feeling for the moment at home in that collection of Indians and Europeans babbling in English and remembered dialects. No matter where she lived, she would never feel so at home again.” –Bharati Mukherjee, “The World According to Hsü”

When I reviewed The White Mary, I wrote about how I was once a traveler. Having lived on three continents, I wonder sometimes where home is and what it means.

“The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.” –Bharati Mukherjee, “The Lady from Lucknow”

It was very important to me to make a home in Seattle with the man who became my husband. I wonder sometimes if we would have been freer to make adventures and live life if I had a stronger sense of a homeland—someplace I could have returned to. Like Ratna, I have more trust in the chaos of the world than in a homeland that has shifted beneath me. And I am finding that home is what I make of it rather than something I can rely on.

As people travel farther and more frequently away from their ancestral homelands, I wonder what is lost. I am not sorry for the many experiences abroad that have made me who I am. There are parts of my soul that are deeply Chilean and Polish—even though those countries as I knew them no longer exist. But I do sometimes wish there was one place on the globe that I could always return to. Someplace I could call home.

Perhaps that is why I have always found comfort in this quote:

“One never reaches home….But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.” –Hermann Hesse, Demian

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Darkness from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

At times in Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee, I found myself wondering if the barbarians were ever actually coming and maybe that was the point. The more often the barbarians were rumored to have done evil things and threatened the outpost, the less I believed they were the real culprits. Crops get ruined and the reader knows the barbarians exist because the protagonist meets them and the crops are ruined but it is spurious to say that because the barbarians exist and the crops are ruined then therefore the barbarians must have ruined the crops (and every other little thing). By the time the narrator says, “The barbarians come out at night,” I was fully convinced that the barbarians were being used as a diversion of some sort. Of course it is difficult to separate myself from a post-Bush reading of this novel although when Coetzee writes, “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy,” I think he was getting at something else.

Stretching Time

Coetzee does a beautiful job of stretching time in the scene when the narrator is hunting the ram. He writes, “His hooves touch ice with a click, his jaw stops in mid-motion, we gaze at each other.” Second by second I was with the magistrate as he met eyes with this ram. It was one of the moments when I was most engaged in the novel. He goes on to write, “He chews again, a single scythe of the jaws, and stops.” Word by slow word and phrase by comma-separated phrase I was completely trapped in this moment and waiting to see what happened next. By ending the sentence with the word “stops” Coetzee both emphasizes the stop and cuts the paragraph. The sentences that follow are about the magistrate’s train of thought as he himself is “suspended in immobility” but these sentences are longer and less focused and my own train of thought started to wander. I found myself longing for that heartbeat by heartbeat pace of his description of the ram.

Practicing Concision

There are other times in this novel where Coetzee conveys a lot of information with very little language. When speaking of the barbarian girl before he decides to return her to her people he says, “I have not entered her.” The sentences that follow are more graphic but somehow they say less than this one sentence. The magistrate could “enter” her—he apparently has the power and freedom to do as he wishes. The mere fact that this sentence mentions nothing about her willingness or interest or anything really besides her existence shows the character’s complete disregard for any of that. Entering her or not is one more decision he will make in his day. At this point in the novel it is no more and no less. Except that she is the only one he seems to have not “entered.” He is saying that she is different in that she is around and available to him and he has touched her intimately, for some unknown reason she is different.

Later Coetzee writes that the magistrate (who is now merely a prisoner) “cannot be sure that the roar (of the mob) is not simply in my eardrums.” This uncertainty on the part of the magistrate as to his own senses conveys a very different man from who he was at the beginning of the book. Coetzee goes on to write about the torment he is enduring and how he has to “keep myself from screaming, tearing my clothes, clawing my flesh” but somehow although this language is more descriptive and I would expect the first person experience of pain to be more compelling, this says less about the character than his inability to accurately gauge the world around him.

In Polska, 1994, I worked on how to convey to the reader both the nature of the teenaged character in all of her angst and also the nature of her experiences without overdoing it. I was interested in how to convey Magda’s experience and her emotions in a way that the reader can engage with and not just witness and in a way that gives some insight into her as a character perhaps beyond the insight she has in herself. With a first person narrator, it is difficult, but Coetzee did it and did it well.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Waiting for the Barbarians from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.